Sen. Warner: Silicon Valley needs to work with Congress more

April 12, 2018

Transcript

We have some members of Congress who are struggling to understand the basics of even the business model of how these companies work.
How do we deal with this?
Well I think hopefully there was a step forward on the education process this week, and that members will.
Maybe get their staffs or others to kinda help brief them up on the basic notion that in effect Facebook is not selling data.
But they're selling information about us so we can then be targeted by advertisers or users or people who wanna spread real content or non-real content.
So, I think there will be an evolutionary process.
I've seen it on the intelligence committee as we've done both, educated members on how the social media models work, but also the ability to really create fake personas, fake accounts.
And we've even seen some of the data mapping that shows where a lot of this Particularly extremist views on both the left and right where some of the post actually originates.
So it's gonna take a while, and that's why my appeal to the Valley and to Mr. Zuckerberg, and for that matter, we wanna see him, we wanna see Jack Dorsey, we wanna Sergey to come back in and talk to the Intelligence Committee on national security issues.
Because this is again, this is a problem that is not gonna go away.
I think for a while the company stopped, they could send their lawyers as they did last fall, do a quick hearing, sweep this under rug and go on as if nothing has changed.
That is not gonna be the case.